Category: career

career

Some Tribble Time

Last Friday, the 6th of April, I had the pleasure of being on-stage host to Mr. David Gerrold, writer.  If you’re not familiar with his work…but what am I saying?  Of course you are!  Even if you may not know it.  David Gerrold wrote one of the most loved episodes of the original Star Trek, the marvelous The Trouble With Tribbles. Even those who don’t especially care for the show tend to like that one.

But if that’s all you’re familiar with by him, then I urge you to correct that lack.  David Gerrold is one of the best SF writers in the business.  I pointed that out last Friday to a packed house.

 

Me as host as photographed by Robert S. Greenfield

 

Donna and I had dinner with David prior to the evening’s performance.  We’d met him long ago so could not say we knew him.  Conversation ranged over the map, but kept coming back to writing and voice.  I sometimes find it hard not to go on about how much I liked someone’s work, but the fact is he wrote some stories that stuck in my head, chief among them being The Man Who Folded Himself.  We talked short fiction, novels, politics, the ill-fated St. Louis Worldcon of 1969 (which he attended and I didn’t) and then did a quick tour with the estimable Jenny Heim of the St. Louis Science Center.  The Star Trek exhibit really is very good and it amazed me how much there was, just how long we’ve been living with this fictional universe.

I did a quick minute or two song-and-dance to introduce him, then he took the stage and regaled us with behind-the-scenes stories of working on the original Star Trek and related minutiae (for instance, the episode was initially called A Fuzzy Thing Happened To Me but had to be changed because of a potential conflict with H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy stories).

David Gerrold, April 6th at the St. Louis Science Center, photo by Robert S. Greenfield

I still pay too little attention to the credits on television shows, a habit from a childhood like, probably, most others in which the stars of the show were the most important aspects.  I did not know till that night that he had written one of my favorite episodes of Babylon 5, one called True Believers, which I thought then and still consider one of the most powerful of a strong series.

Anyway, it was a great evening and I am thrilled to have been invited to be part of it.

Oh, and please note—the photographs were taken by Robert S. Greenfield.  You should check out his online galleries.

Art

On A Roll

I’ve been having a productive month.  This morning I polished up and submitted the fifth short story in two weeks.  Granted, most of them are rewrites, but a couple of them are such thorough redrafts that they might as well be all new, like the one I finished today.

Normally, I let a story sit for a while before sending it out, but right now I just want material in submission.  It has been a long time since I’ve had this kind of productivity in short fiction and I want to take full advantage of it.  Of course, it would be nice if some (or all) sold, especially to the markets they’ve been sent.

Soon, now, I’ll have two novels to start rewriting, once the notes are finished from the two people going over them.  Then I will set the short fiction aside and bury myself in the lengthier pieces.  There was a time I could finish a novel and write a few short stories with the left-over energy, but since about 2004 I have been in full novel mode almost continuously.  (The last brand new short story I sold was Duty Free for Lee Martindales Ladies of Tradetown anthology.)  During these past years, I either haven’t been able to finish the stories or they’ve come out crooked, sorry beasts requiring much T.L.C. and more time than I’ve been willing to devote.

Plus there have been the almost nonstop worries that are deadly to the creative process.  For whatever reason, those worries seem to have receded for the nonce.  Oh, they’re still there, they haven’t been solved, but they aren’t looming over me with Damocletian malevolence.

For the time being.

The other thing that has been distracting me, of course, is this thing here.  This.  The blog.  It seems my need for short work is satisfied by spinning out the varied and sundry expository forays here.  Granted, I usually pick a topic that I’m interested in, that I have, I think, something to say about, but really, I am no pundit, and if I were really good at this wouldn’t I be doing it for money?

But I do it and since it’s my blog, I say what I please, and that serves a need.  Sometimes I do this in order to codify my own feelings.  There’ve been a few times I’ve written something and found that I’d changed my mind about the subject by the time I finished.  Not often, but it’s happened.

However, I want to say thank you to any and all who come visit me here.  Whether you agree with me or not, even if I piss you off, the one thing I hope I never do is bore you.

I have another non-boring, froth-fomenting post coming up soon, but I wanted some breathing space between the last and the next.

Have a good weekend.  I’m going to do some more fiction now.

career

Noir at the Bar

There is, in University City, which is attached to St. Louis with Washington University as a buffer, a cool little coffeehouse/restaurant called Meshuggah’s.  They play host to a literary event called Noir at the Bar, which my friend Scott Phillips and a gentleman named Jedediah Ayres manage.  Primarily it’s all about crime fiction, which apparently includes a vast range of macabre material.

They had me in their line-up on February 28th.  I am the first science fiction writer to perform at this event and I think it went rather well.  It was recorded for podcast by Booked and the link to my reading is now up.  Right here.

I had a good time and the other readers were fine, I recommend them.  An evening of good readings and fine company.

Art

The Chance of Failure

Watch this TED video from economist Larry Smith, then continue.

I have done almost all the things in his presentation to excuse my failure. I have done them (except for having children of my own) and then fought like the devil to get out of the trap in which they’d ensnared me.

I’m a procrastinator. I’m doing it now. I have a novelette open right now that I should be working on, but here I am, writing about my terrible penchant for procrastination instead. Why? I have never figured this out. It’s as if there is a subroutine in the deepware of my brain that presents as continual distraction, like one of those little bugs on the internet that no matter how hard you try to get to this page, it always takes you to that one.

I have thousands of little tricks to keep myself from doing the hard, important work.

But somehow I’ve written over 15 novels, published 10 of them, along with many short stories. My failure, such as it is, will not be seen in my production (though I see it, indeed I do) but in Follow Through.

I’m terrible at self-promotion, self-marketing, all the little component parts of conducting a Career that are necessary but, to me, intimidating. After all, I’m a writer—dealing face to face with people is not what I do, not what I want to do. If I wanted to do that I’d get a job as a salesman. I’ve been a salesman, I was even good at it long ago and far away, but I loathed it.

That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.

The one element Mr. Smith did not discuss is an intrinsic failure of finding the right way to do what you want. I have the passion, I have the drive (though I’m getting a bit frayed around the edges) but I somehow keep driving off the road into a ditch. I can see the road, I just can’t seem to stay on it. All by virtue of producing product that has, in the past, not attracted the right attention.

Or so it seems.

Even this, I know, is an excuse, but sometimes a necessary one to maintain sanity. These are the nibbling ducks of chance—the right publisher, the right agent, the right window for publication, the right reviews, none of which are in your control.

Nevertheless, you need to do, and do well, the one or two things that are in your control, so that when the stars are right and the planets align, the work is ready. The most necessary and often hardest thing to do to facilitate that is to ignore all the other stuff. It is the Work that matters. Never mind the market, never mind the dwindling bank account, never mind the critics who were boneheaded about your last book, never mind all the ancillary shit that is certainly important but only serves to distract you from the Work.

That’s hard to do. It takes practice. And it’s wearying.

But I do recommend hearing Mr. Smith out. Because what he’s talking about are all the things people do before they even get to the Work to sabotage themselves.

What you have to do is take a chance on yourself. Just…take a chance. Regret is a terrible thing on which to end your days.

Art

2012

So we survived the night.  The mad hordes banging on the steel shutters disturbed our sleep not at all.  This morning we looked out at the devastation and counted ourselves among the fortunate survivors, nevertheless aware that this year—this year—is the one to fear most…

I never make resolutions and usually I don’t even make plans.  Over the last many years I’ve found that all I accomplish is an increase in guilt when I fail to live up to my promises to myself.  I have enough self-deprecation already, I don’t need to make an annual celebration out of it.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have things I want to accomplish.

I think I’ll keep most of it to myself.  Anyone keeping up with this blog has a pretty good idea what my ambitions are, and they don’t really follow an annual cycle.  If there is one thing, though, that needs to change, it is my deep conviction that much of what I wish to do will never happen.  I surprised myself between 1990 and 2001 by doing exactly what I had till that decade thought I’d never manage—publish.

The fact is, I have always held back from myself the kind of faith that opens up possibilities.  I’m ready to accept successes when they happen, but I always seem to keep myself from believing they will.  Sometimes—often—this can result in self-sabotage.  Never intentional, always unconscious, but effective all the same.  And I don’t know why.  Thirty or forty years ago, untried and with nothing to show for any effort, it made a kind of sense.  I hadn’t proved anything to myself or anyone else.

Starting in 1980 that changed and I have a track record now.  So it’s maybe time to start believing in myself.  At least more than I have been.  And enjoy it.

So here’s a few things I’d like to try to do this coming year.

One, publish a new novel.  At the very least get a contract for one.

Two, take a long vacation or two with Donna and travel to some new places.

Three, maybe actually mount a decent photographic exhibition.  It’s long overdue, I have a lot of good work that will, if I don’t do something about it, disappear into oblivion without anyone ever seeing it.

Four…

Well, four, have a better time.

So, irresolute but with purpose, I welcome 2012 and wish you all the very best in the coming 12 months.  I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

And thank you for paying attention and giving a damn.

Art

Many Lives

This is just very yeah.

When asked why I write, I have many answers, but this captures the entire inner gestalt of why.

Not getting to live all the lives I wanted to. I know what she means. I assumed at one time I would be a writer, an actor, a musician, a producer-director, and all the other things that attach to these ambitions. In a way, I did get to do them, but not the way I thought I would.

Anyway, this is marvelous.

Art

No Politics

Not this morning.  It’s hard, I know, because so much is going on that I could  comment about, but…

The novel revision I mentioned a couple of posts back is done.  Done and at my agent.  I did a top to bottom revision, adding in the new material that desperately wanted to be included, and except for yesterday it all went remarkably well.

Yesterday, though…yes…Murphy was in residence.

We went to the gym and then Donna had an errand to run, so I descended to the dungeon  office and began.  I’d already started the final work on the last chapter a couple days earlier, but I had Other Things To Do on both Tuesday and Wednesday that kept me away.  That was fine, it gave my subconscious time to work out some kinks and so I was more than ready to work on the remainder.

It was good stuff.  I say that because much of it is gone.  I practically rewrote the entirety of the last chapter and I was very carefully laying in the new material and deleting the old as I went.  But I became caught up in the work—it happens—and neglected to hit SAVE as often as I should.  (Yes, I have a timed save, but it was not quickly enough to prevent what happened.)

Revisions complete, I had a large chunk of old text to delete and I proceeded to highlight it for destruction and—

It crashed.  Don’t know why or how but suddenly WordPerfect complained (it never does this!) and shut down.  When I rebooted I found everything intact, but now I had this little box telling me that since it hadn’t exited properly, in order to preserve the back-up I had to open it and rename it, which I tried to do, but something was preventing it from “taking” so I tried cutting and pasting to get the changes into the original and then it crashed again and—-

The long and the short of it is, I lost my revisions on the last chapter.  All of them.

By which time Donna was home and I was fuming.  No, that’s not quite it.  I was in a blood-red, Conanesque rage, stomping around the house, yelling, cursing computers and the spawn that created them, almost but not quite punching things.

We had lunch. I returned to the deeps, sucked it up, and started over.

In all this, I had forgotten the dog.  Coffey still needed her walk and I forgot.  I’m a bad owner.  Donna came down and asked if I wanted her to take Coffey and after a few minutes of guilt-ridden negotiation, she did.

And I finished the last chapter.

Then I went on to make the final corrections to the epilogue, saved the puppy, and sent it to my agent.  (And then another weird thing happened to it, but that’s all straightened out now, so never mind.)

When I began the revisions, the manuscript was just a hair under 90 thousand words.   It’s gained 4,000 and a lot more cohesion.  In my humble opinion, it works now, whereas before it merely sufficed.

You might get the impression from the foregoing that I don’t enjoy my work.  Quite the contrary, the reason I tolerate these little instances of Murphyesque meltdown it because I love it.  I slept the sleep of the righteous last night, and this morning I am thinking back over the work and smiling.  Though I know I have at least one more pass to get through with it, when Stacia gets done making all her notes and edits, at this point I am pleased with the product.

What I now have to do, which is long, long overdue, is clean the dungeon office.  I have piles of stuff everywhere.  It’s been a few years since I’ve done a really thorough cleaning in here, which includes new bookshelves, sorting through notes that have lost all significance, finding things I’ve forgotten I misplaced, and just generally making the room livable.  When I work on a novel, there is a kind of conservation of chaos at work—as order increases in the story upon which I labor, a commensurate increase in disorder occurs in the immediate environment.  So as the novel nears completion, its maximum point of order, the room falls apart in near ruin.

In the last few years, I have written one and a half new novels and rewritten two from top to bottom, without pause.  You can imagine the task before me.

So…is Gingrich still the GOP frontrunner?

career

The Wrong One

So…I’m again rewriting the historical mystery.  Thought I was done with this draft and had only to await the edits from my most excellent agent, but alas, I have this impish ethical streak that won’t let me just slide…

Basically, I came up with a minor, almost throwaway, solution to a tiny plot problem as part of the whole revamp and happily sent the novel forth.  But then that solution began to grow in my imagination, like a tumor, until I realized that I had a much bigger problem arising from the solution.  Not to worry!  It would form the basis for the next book in the series!

That settled, I went about doing other things.

Only my unconscious kept churning on it and wouldn’t let me drop it like that.  I had created a growing organism within the body of my novel that had to be dealt with.  Argh!

Yes, I said argh!  because I wanted to get on with other things.  But.  Not to be. The coup de gras came last weekend over an excellent dinner with my friend Carolyn Gilman (who has a new novel out and you really ought to go get it and read it ’cause it’s really, you know, good).  Carolyn works for the Missouri History Museum and her current project is the Revolutionary War in the West—exactly the place and period in which my novel is set.  In the course of the conversation we stumbled on some little-known—no, that’s an understatement—some previously unexamined aspects of the Battle of St. Louis and George Rogers Clark and all that which irritated my tumor into full-blown eruption and I realized that I had to do this rewrite now!

This made me a bit nervous, as Stacia, my agent, has had what we thought was the second to last draft for a few months now and I had no idea how deep into it she’d gotten and I had to tell her to hold off—

The revisions will make this a much better book and when I described them to Stacia she was not only supportive but excited and so now I’m a hundred pages into a new draft.  I’ll just give you a little hint as to what was wrong and if anyone remembers this after the book comes out you can ask me about it and I’ll recount the tale.  Basically I had the wrong murderer.

Embarrassing, I know, but hey, not even the historical facts I learned from Carolyn are particularly well known and the interpretation she’s putting on them are unique, so I don’t feel like a total slacker.

Anyway, if I’m not posting here much in the next few weeks, this is why.  So have a happy, healthful Turkey Day, everyone.

career

There Is Contact…

Hey, something of a more lit’rary nature now.  I have a stored reprinted in the new collection Alien Contact  edited by Marty Halpern.  Here is the cover:

 

I am very jazzed about this for a whole bunch of reasons.  One is that I have had very few stories anthologized this way (as a reprint).  Another is the superb company I’m keeping in here—Le Guin, Swanwick, Silverberg, Cadigan, Gaiman, King, Stross, and so on and so forth.  Still another is that Marty took one of my own personal favorites, Texture of Other Ways.  This is a kind of prequel story to my Secantis Sequence.  This is about the big hairy conference that precedes the events in my novel Compass Reach and sort of sets everything in motion.

I would put a link to direct purchase, but I don’t really want anyone to buy it from Amazon.  I’ve been in a real “support your local independent bookstore” mode for some time now, so until I find a better direct link I’d like to ask you all to go order it from your local indie.  Sorry if this is inconvenient, but that’s how I feel just now.

Anyway, I hope y’all enjoy it, especially if you didn’t catch these stories the first time around.

career

Controversy Bullies

We thrive on controversy.  Say something in this country, make a statement, be declarative, and someone will get in your face and tell you you’re wrong and suddenly there’s an audience.  People choose sides, there’s shouting.  We should license controversy vendors who appear quickly to sell tickets, popcorn, and soft drinks of choice when this happens.

For a long time now there’s been a watchdog group with a website and an agenda to keep track of fraud committed against writers.  You would think this would be a noncontroversial, no-brainer—writers work on margin, are underpaid usually, and can’t afford attorneys to look out for their interests.  Despite exceptions, most writers rarely are able (or even, sometimes, willing) to litigate on their own behalf.  It’s time-consuming, ulcer-causing, and pricey!  And often it’s against a corporate entity that has a war chest that can spend a writer into oblivion even before the case gets before a judge.  So Writers Beware started up as a service to alert writers to who the bad guys are.  And there are—bad guys.

Not too surprisingly, said bad guys don’t like this.  Writers Beware has taken a bite out of their bottom line, derailed some of their scams, and given writers some power to protect themselves.  That’s to be expected.

But this is just underhanded.  Assuming for a second it is what it claims, it is to be dumbstruck at the lunacy.  Why would a writer join an organization dedicated to destroying another organization that is protecting writers?

I don’t know who is really behind Write Agenda, but they’re going after people who have done service for writers.  If in fact individual writers are doing this, it seems as boneheaded as blue collar workers who attack unions for defending higher pay and better working conditions.

Which happens.

As a kid, this is simple.  There are bullies in the schoolyard.  It’s nice when the teacher looks out for them and does something, but what was better was for there to be some kid big and bad enough to take on the bullies and sort of protect the weaker ones.  That’s pretty much what such organizations like Writer Beware do.  Fraud is a criminal offense and it’s nice when an Attorney General or D.A. prosecutes for it, but the fact is they don’t have the resources (or sometimes the inclination) to police the way we’d like them to.  So occasionally a watchdog group springs up and when they’re effective, the bullies look for opportunity to get rid of them so they can return to lording it over the other kids.

But there always seems to be a handful who don’t like the protector.  For whatever reason, they seem to prefer to get beat up rather than accept help.  It doesn’t make sense, it’s counterintuitive—maybe they don’t like feeling beholden and certainly we’d all like to be able to take care of ourselves.

But we aren’t kids and this kind of assault is pretty common these days.  Labels get thrown around, occasionally bordering on libel or slander, tempers rise, and the controversy draws an audience.

In this case, it’s reasonably easy to see the difference.  Writer Beware has a track record.  All The Write Agenda seems to have is a bunch of baseless assertions.  But they’re engaging in the Great American Pastime of “Let’s Create A Controversy!” combined with “Let’s You and Him Fight!”    At least we have one advantage in this one—writers (generally speaking) can read.